You ever think the Nazis started out as Christian nationalists.

[Duncanpup]

[no_hypocrisy]

1. No. They started out as disenchanted WWI veterans who formed The Freikorps.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freikorps

They formed paramilitary groups who were assuaged by the Weimar Republic. They didn't want democracy.

[Duncanpup]

2. True

Yet the rise of Hitler was supported by the good Christian Germans. Like today with these christofascist in support of their orange messiah just ignoring any of Jesus teachings.

[vlyons]

3. The established Christian church has a long long history of

oppression, slavery, war, thievery, misogyny, lies, power-mongering etc etc. There have been some Christians, who practiced the teachings of Jesus, but the established church -- ehhh, not so much.

[multigraincracker]

9. At the start of the movement the farmers were

standing up for Hitler. The they were the first to be sent to the Russian Front.

[Hassin Bin Sober]

22. Yep. And now we hear them constantly bleating about how "we are not a democracy!"

I guess any crimes against democracy they can commit in “the name of the republic” will be justified.

[MutantAndProud]

4. The antisemitism and nationalist ideology did

Pretty much stem directly from the fusion of church culture and the state’s imperial infallibility complex in German culture pre-WW’s so… yeah kinda. Given the age of leadership at the time it would also probably be very typical of the majority to be non-atheist (I don’t recall the demographic statistics). The clash between the new age philosophers and new extremely capable wealthy industrial society and the more rural feudal and straight-laced church-led society wasn’t exactly quiet. Swaths of the population were angsty, unsettled, unemployed, relocated, living in extreme paradigm shifts, and then looking for scapegoats after the first WW failure; Jewish people were easy to sell as the token ‘big bad’, and it was a quick slope to anyone else that got in the way and was easy to blame

[Duncanpup]

5. You need stop buy and have a coffee with me.

I could listen to you explain all day long.

[MutantAndProud]

6. Any time!

[Effete Snob]

12. The skids were greased for that sale

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Jews_and_Their_Lies

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Nazi_Germany

[MutantAndProud]

14. They were indeed

All of the minorities or undesirables were really previously public sport for the masses prior to the world wars. Should make people think about the meaning behind ‘new rome’

[MayReasonRule]

21. Exceptionally Well Said!

[Lonestarblue]

7. Yes. The German Evangelical Church supported the Nazi Party and its nationalistic agenda.

Just as the Nazis purged (i.e., murdered) German citizens for being disabled, gay, Romany, Jewish, etc., white Christian evangelicals in the US are pushing for a country where LGBTQ have no rights even to exist, along with black and brown people. I don’t believe that most evangelicals want to murder these people, but I do believe they want to make life so difficult for them that they’re forced back in the closet in the case of LGBTQ or forced to accept their “inferior” status in the case of black and brown people.

The Nazis pushed the belief in the purity of white German blood, and having that purity granted privilege to most Germans. We have our own white privilege here, and that is what Republicans and Christian Nationalists both are fighting to preserve by creating a country where only their ideals are legal and forced on the whole population. We should not forget that slavery was fully supported by churches in the South. We should also not forget the major organizations like the Federalist Society that are working to support Christian Nationalism in the courts, as well as other organizations run by Leonard Leo that are undermining rights in the states by funding the push for draconian legislation against LGBTQ, especially trans kids. The whole Moms for Liberty group is funded by some major group—we just don’t know who. They are attacking public education to introduce Christian beliefs into classrooms and to minimize the effects of slavery as well as the contributions of minorities in US history, in effect trying to erase any history that shows heinous acts by white people.

The following describes how German evangelicals aligned with Nazism. It could just as well describe US Christian Nationalists.

“The largest Protestant church in Germany in the 1930s was the German Evangelical Church, comprised of 28 regional churches or Landeskirchen that included the three major theological traditions that had emerged from the Reformation: Lutheran, Reformed, and United. Most of Germany's 40 million Protestants were members of this church, although there were smaller so-called "free" Protestant churches, such as Methodist and Baptist churches.

Historically the German Evangelical Church viewed itself as one of the pillars of German culture and society, with a theologically grounded tradition of loyalty to the state. During the 1920s, a movement emerged within the German Evangelical Church called the Deutsche Christen, or "German Christians." The "German Christians" embraced many of the nationalistic and racial aspects of Nazi ideology. Once the Nazis came to power, this group sought the creation of a national "Reich Church" and supported a "nazified" version of Christianity.”

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-german-churches-and-the-nazi-state

[Duncanpup]

8. How do you take your eggs Lonestar blue

You need to come and hang out I’ll listen to you and mutant and proud who posted as well over breakfast.

[Lonestarblue]

11. Over easy is good! Unfortunately, I'm a long way from you.

[Effete Snob]

13. It is, at this point, that Evangelicals will show up to loudly protest...

...and wave around notable exceptions like Dietrich Bonhoeffer - a Lutheran theologian who objected to Nazism.

What they fail to realize is that Bonhoeffer is notable because he was an exception.

It is the way that people imagine out of conceit that, had they lived in the antebellum South, they would have been an abolitionist.

Nazism was wildly popular among the majority Protestant culture of Germany, and not entirely unpopular with everyone else.

[Strelnikov_]

19. "With God on Our Side"

"Gott mit uns" ('God with us', 'With God on Our Side')


?20210106001804

[Effete Snob]

10. Start with Martin Luther

By translating the Bible into German, Luther incidentally provided a reference standard for a standard German language, and the break with Rome was politically convenient for regional German rulers.

The roadmap for the holocaust was written and published by Martin Luther in 1543


https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Jews_and_Their_Lies

On The Jews And Their Lies

In the treatise, he argues that Jewish synagogues and schools be set on fire, their prayer books destroyed, rabbis forbidden to preach, homes burned, and property and money confiscated. Luther claimed they should be shown no mercy or kindness,[2] afforded no legal protection,[3] and "these poisonous envenomed worms" should be drafted into forced labor or expelled for all time.[4] He also seems to advocate their murder, writing "[W]e are at fault in not slaying them".[5]

——-

There is a direct line between Evangelical Christianity and Nazism.

The standard issue belt buckle bore the inscription, “God With Us”



Luther was by no means the only anti-Semite of his day, but he had a particular role in forging German identity, culture, and majority religion at the time of Nazi ascendancy.

[Johnny2X2X]

15. Thank you

The Nazis were Christians, Hitler didn't give a speech without invoking Christ and the Bible. The entire movement was based on Christianity. The single biggest and most repeated piece of propaganda against the Jews was that according to the Bile they killed Christ.

There has been a concerted effort to whitewash Christianity from Nazism in this country, but it was at the heart of the movement. Even in pop culture, the Nazis are protrayed as into the occult or deists when they were in fact far right Christians. The Lutheran Church played a central role while the Catholic Church enabled Nazism. Hitler was similar to Trump in that he wasn't all that religious, but he used religious dogma to enforce everything he was trying to do.

They rounded up homosexuals, communists, intellectuals, and atheists while they rounded up the Jews.

And make no mistake about it, the MAGA movement was modeled after Nazism, and not just by hapenstance, but purposely, Trump has always had people around him who studied the works of Hitler and Goebbels as a how to guide for seizing and holding power. In short, we've seen this all before.

[Effete Snob]

16. What amazes me...

...is that they get offended when the subject is brought up, since the whitewashing has been primarily effective on them.

Never mind the fact that, right here in this country, the second largest Christian denomination was born out of promoting slavery.

Christians in this country routinely misrepresent their history, starting with the Pilgrims. They recite this litany of "fleeing from oppression", ignoring the fact that they first moved from England to the Netherlands, were religious diversity was tolerated. Among the reasons they left the Netherlands was precisely because religious diversity was tolerated, and they couldn't tolerate that. Growing up among other believers was having a negative effect on their youth.

[Johnny2X2X]

17. Slavery

Southern Christians found all the justification they ever needed to own slaves in the bible. They considered slavery a divinely ordained institution. The US was so slow to abolish slavery because of Christianity, although Christians in the North did play a huge role in fighting for abolition.

We have gone so far down a path of denyng history in this country. The latest push by Far Right to prevent the teaching of Civil Rights in our class rooms is just the cherry on top of an already mountain sized white wash sundae of revisionism. The average American is already woefully ignorant of American history as it really occurred.

[Duncanpup]

23. Exactly thanks for posting

[ExWhoDoesntCare]

26. It is not true that Hilter wasn't religious

That is another distortion that christians try to commit to absolve themselves of their role in Nazism.

He was a devout Catholic, obsessed with church history and some of its myths, like the Grail legend. One of his other big religious obsessions was with the Cathar heresy, and how the church dealt with that.

He wrote often of his religious views, which are rather typical of most christians of his day, and proclaimed himself a "warrior for christ."

None of that is indicative of a casual believer, so stop trying to foist him onto the casual or non-believing side of the aisle. He doesn't belong there.

[Maru Kitteh]

27. Thank you so much for posting this. I was in my late 30's by the time

I understood this at all, really. I had completely bought into the "Nazis were pagans or cultists and totally not Christians, nope nope nope" thing because that's all we were ever taught.

[MayReasonRule]

20. That's Right! Killing In The Name Of Is At The Core Of The Abrahamic Delusions

[MayReasonRule]

18. The Core Principles Of Intimidation, Incarceration and Extermination Are As Old As Mankind

"Christianity" emerged from the Abrahamic blood cults responsible for genocidal barbaric atrocities.

Those embroiled in such delusions have been fighting, and killing each other in the name of their "god" ever since their cultures adopted those delusions are their cultural norms.

The core principals of Nazi National Socialism are not unique.

That those things are still happening today is not surprising given the willful ignorance of those blinded by hate or indifferenc that instead choose to embrace an undying love of hardcore believers, an unshakeable faith in fools and in dreamers, and a holy devotion to "sins of the ages".

The Machiavellian have lead the Darwin Award Winners down the proverbial primrose path for as long as mankind has existed.
Machiavelli and Darwin have always and will always apply.

Delusion is the problem.
Reason is the answer.

But yeah, the malevolent delusions of Abrahamic Christianity are core principles of the Nazi menace.

I'm a huge fan of mythology, it reveals and informs.
I'm a huge adversary of religion, it obscures and deceives.

May reason rule where delusion dwells.

[ExWhoDoesntCare]

24. Is this a trick question?

Because of course they did.

Who had been preaching the most hardcore Jewish hatred for centuries?

Who had not only preached hatred of Jews, but spent centuries destroying their businesses, synagogues, schools and even lives? Who exiled them from country after country, stealing all of their possessions in the process? Who conducted mass extinction pogroms against the Jews over and over and over and over again?

christians, that's who. From the earliest days of the religion, right through the Crusades--when the hordes on their supposedly sacred missions killed Jews along the way to the "holy" land, right through to the Inquisitions, the witch-burnings, and on and on and on and on, they were set on destroying Jews and anyone else who ticked them off, whenever given the slightest opportunity for it.

Even if they became more marginally "civilized" after the Enlightenment, plenty of christians couldn't resist any chance they could get to trash Jews. Even something as seemingly removed from such things as classical music wasn't free of it. Chopin, Liszt, Wagner--all expressed virulent anti-Semitic views. Richard Wagner even came up with the phrase, "Final Solution" for solving the "Jewish problem."

And where do you think they learned these views? Gee, maybe it was from their own churches and religious leaders preaching the hate, and even actively plotting to destroy Jews and Judaism. For centuries. Think it wasn't the leaders of the religion?

Think again.

Have you read Martin Luther's "On the Jews?" It is one long tirade of the most venomous hatred ever put to print about any group of people. And why is that 16th century tract important?

1) Most Germans were quite familiar with the work.

2) It laid out the exact blueprint for how to destroy Jews and Judaism that the Nazis would later follow. Step by evil step.

3) Kristallnacht happened on Martin Luther's birthday, by design. Hitler and his evil minions intended it as an homage to his hatred of Jews, and it was the rare German who did not see the significance of committing that atrocity on that particular date.

But go ahead and pretend that history hasn't demonstrated the connection between christians, their promotion of ethnic hatred, and violent tyranny, over and over again.

[Marius25]

25. 95% of Nazis in Germany were Christian

About 55% Protestant, 40% Catholic

[leftyladyfrommo]

28. I think both Hitler and Stalin studied for the priesthood.

Both their mothers were very religeous and their fathers were brutal. Dangerous combination.